The Qantas breach is a wake-up call on cyber threats
The Qantas data breach shows why businesses, governments and individuals must all take responsibility for improving cyber resilience and data protection.
Raff Ciccone is a federal Labor senator for Victoria and chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.
If Australians needed further proof of the threat cyberattacks pose to businesses of all sizes — and their customers — they got it when Qantas revealed this month that the personal data of nearly six million customers had been stolen.
Names, email addresses, dates of birth, contact details and frequent flyer numbers were compromised — not through a breach of a central server, but via an offshore third-party call centre platform.
Earlier data breaches at Optus, Medibank and Latitude have already highlighted the scale of disruption caused by cyberattacks.
Effective, robust cyber security requires businesses and government to work together to confront a threat that is constantly evolving.
